One Less Excuse © 2013 by Christopher Salah
All right reserved. No part of this book may be used or reproduced by any mechanical, photographic, or electronic process or in the form of a phonographic recording; nor may it be stored in a retrieval system, transmitted, or otherwise be copied for public or private use—other than for "fair use" as a brief quotation embodied in articles or reviews without prior written permission.
For information, contact:
christophersalah@yahoo.com
Library of Congress Catalog-in-Publication Data
Salah, Christopher.
One less excuse: concise, up-to-date, scientifically proven & researched information to take back your health /
Christopher Salah.
Includes index.
TXu 1-872-933
ISBN: 978-1-4675-9930-6 (sc)
ISBN: 978-1-4675-9931-3 (e)
Cover Design & Layout: Nikki Orzel
The contents and information in this book are not substitutes for competent and personal medical care. Any diet or lifestyle changes implemented by a reader of this book are adopted at the sole discretion and risk of that individual reader. Modifications to diet and lifestyle should be monitored by your doctor. All the information in this book has been gained through scientific research and an expert knowledge of the physiology of the human body. If your doctor is not open to the information here it might be time to find a physician who is more open and interested in your health.
Lovingly dedicated to:
My mother, father and entire family for their unwavering support
Nikki, for breathing life into my book and making it a reality
Porter, for going above and beyond
Andrea, for the countless times she patiently read and re-read the proofs along with her inspirational insight
About the Author
I come from a very conservative family. Although I know my parents would have supported me in any career path, it felt that my main choices were doctor, lawyer or “do what Dad does.” Dad was in the hotel business, which was not for me. My sister was a lawyer, and she made it clear that field wasn't for me either. So doctor it was. However, I'm not sure how I knew it at the time, but I knew for sure that having a nurse take your vitals and spending one to two minutes with the doctor before he or she handed you pills to take…was not medicine. I wanted to help people be healthy and stay healthy; full of energy and life. It was actually my sister who handed me the brochure for the school in Los Angeles that offered a degree in Chinese medicine. I was fifteen years old when this happened.
After high school I quickly finished my two-year Associate's and started a two-thousand-hour program to obtain a Master's of Science in Oriental Medicine. The medicine was amazing. Although I am known as an acupuncturist, this is actually a poor title for people with my degree. We spend more hours of study learning hundreds upon hundreds of herbs and the combination of these herbs to treat illness. Just like doctors use pharmaceuticals, we use herbs — except we aim to treat the root of the condition and not just mask the symptoms of a disease. We learned all types of different techniques to encourage the body to heal itself. Our training also focused on meditation, exercise programs, nutrition, and everything we needed to help people prevent disease and heal the body.
After I finished my Master's, I spent years working alongside orthopedic surgeons as part of a team doing post-op rehabilitation. It was amazing to see that the people who elected to have me as part of their team healed twice as fast and used half their medications. It was here that I started to notice the impact that stress has on the body. It was quite obvious that my patients who felt more stress — because of the circumstances involving surgery — did not heal as fast.
A couple of years later I enrolled in a clinical doctorate program
while maintaining a private practice and continuing to work with the surgeons. As part of my doctorate I started to teach Chinese medicine, discovering that teaching was a passion of mine. I have been teaching in one form or another ever since. During my doctorate years, I spent time in hospitals and community clinics, treating everyone from the homeless person you see every day to the people who have never worked a day in their lives. From the very poor to the very rich; tens of thousands of people crossed my path and every day I helped them as best I could.
Through so much interaction with my patients, their bodies, and their health; with miracle successes and miserable failures, I started to see patterns in who the healthy people were and who the ill were. I saw patterns in who healed faster, who responded better to treatment, and who did not.
It became glaringly obvious that there are two major aspects of life that influence our health strongly; stress and diet. These were the core principles ingrained in the philosophy of Chinese medicine but, over the years, I had started to lose my way and not completely address these factors wholeheartedly. I had become too focused on trying to fix people instead of giving my patients the knowledge to fix themselves.
Knowing that eating well is the foundation for our health, I wanted to be able to answer any and all of my patients' questions. I wanted to be able to guide them in the right direction. To accomplish this, I went to the bookstore and bought about a dozen of the best-selling diet and nutrition books out there: books by Dr. Mehmet C. Oz, Dr. Dean Ornish, Dr. Andrew Weil, John Robinson, Dr. Jessica K. Black, T. Colin Campbell, Ph.D., and Thomas M. Campbell II to name a few. What was astonishing was that the information and research contained in these books was the same — 90% of the time, all these doctors agreed! This is shocking in the medical world.
Then a change of life happened. I am an adventurous person at heart. Although I absolutely love what I do — being able to help people live happier, healthier lives — I was bored with my life.
One day at school between the classes I was teaching, I saw a poster that read, “How would you like to see the world and do what you love?” It was from a company that placed acupuncturists on cruise ships. I decided to call, and six months later I was flying to Sydney, Australia, to join my first ship's crew.
Over the next year, this would become the main motivator to write and publish the information in this book.
Part of my job on the ships was to lecture and educate the guests about alternative medicine and health in general. Every single week for nine months I did a lecture on diet and nutrition based on the most current scientific research available. Thousands of people took a seat to listen, and every single week I startled people with this information. Week after week, month after month, I got surprised looks and the same questions over and over.
Now, after almost three years of lecturing and helping Australian, British, and American cruise passengers, I know it wasn't just my American patients at home who needed help. Almost everyone I met who suffered from any form of illness had no clue how to take care of their bodies and correct the imbalances that made them suffer. Many simply took pills that their doctors gave them to keep them alive just a little bit longer.
This book is dedicated to dispelling the collective ignorance to which we (including my former self) are slaves. I have done this by compiling thousands upon thousands of pages of health science, translating it into a language everyone can understand, and writing a short and simple book that addresses the core issues in our lives. I hope everyone who reads this will find something in it that benefits his or her life; something to make life easier, more comfortable, and more enjoyable.
In my mind there is nothing worse than living sick, in pain, and worrying about or managing a disease. After a decade of service to others, I know firsthand that if we know the right information and if we use it, we can regain our health. I will start this book exactly how I will end it.
Never give up!
About This Book
Having lectured on health topics on three continents I've been asked hundreds of times after my seminars, “Have you written a book?” My answer was always the same, “No” because everything I present has already been written. All the facts are out there. The studies, the research, have all been done. Information on health and diet has been published over and over. There are our famous doctors on TV sharing the same information that I present in my lectures. There are documentaries and films; CDs and DVDs. Yet week after week and month after month, the majority of people and patients I speak to, including my own family, are still very, very confused as to what goes into good health. What does it include? Where do we start?
My last little nudge to "write about something already written" came when I was doing house calls. Time after time, I would walk in to see a patient and out of the corner of my eye see the book I'd recommend sitting on the shelf collecting dust. When I go to my family's and friends' houses, I'd see the same books because I either recommended them, they saw them on TV, or someone else said they loved them. But there the books sat with their first 20 pages creased, no more, placed forever in the corner. More times than not, when I gave a book recommendation, my patients would tell me they already had that one. Did you read it? The answer, usually: no.
The reason for this is fairly simple. Many of us, including myself, are lazy when it comes to our health and most good books by famous and distinguished doctors are too long.
They are technical, written in scientific terms, and they can be dense and confusing. This is especially true if you know nothing about the human body and how it functions.
The following is both the disclaimer for this book, a description of exactly what this book offers, and how it can help you and your loved ones enjoy improved health and better lives.
This book is not intended to diagnose, treat, prevent, or cure any
illness or disease and does not replace competent medical care by a qualified practitioner. Funny enough, the information in this book has been scientifically proven to treat, cure, and quite specifically prevent disease in the human body. However, it is important that any changes to diet or lifestyle be monitored by your physician especially if you are taking medications for life-threatening illnesses. Unfortunately many physicians are not trained or educated in the topics presented in this book, and like many of us have been corrupted to think only one way about diet and lifestyle. If your current doctor is not open to the information presented here then it is time to consider finding one who is more open, up-to-date, and supportive of what you're trying to do as someone courageously embracing health and happiness.
What's in this book? This book is a compilation of many famous doctors' work, cutting-edge scientific researchers' observations, the writings of best-selling authors on health and diet, along with basic human physiology (how the body works) — all tied together into a simple, easy-to-understand program to move you forward into general well-being and health. Everything in this book is supported by scientific research (almost all of it from human trials). There is a "notes" section in the back that says where a particular quote was found. And Appendix E is a further-reading section with the most cutting-edge and informational books.
Many will feel that what is presented here is too “out there” and fantastic because for so many years we've been told otherwise by our parents, doctors and people we trust. There will be a lot in this book that goes against what we've always known and believed. I urge you to be open and know that everything written here has been proven to be true through research; research done on individuals, on societies, and even on entire populations.
Chapter 1
Let’s Look At Some Facts
Americans spend more money per person on health care then any other country in the world, yet our nation is ranked 37th in health-care performance, 27th in life expectancy, and our health is getting worse and worse. Heart disease is the number one killer and will claim the lives of one out of three Americans. After heart disease, the second leading cause of death is cancer. Just five years ago when educating my patients, I used to say that one out of three of us will get cancer; now, that statistic is one in two. Obesity has doubled in the United States in the last 30 years: one-third of Americans are obese and more than 60 percent are overweight. Diabetes, one of the Top 10 killers, has increased 70 percent in people in their 30s from 1990 to 1998 resulting in 25.8 million Americans suffering with diabetes by 2010! I see too many of my patients in their 60s and 70s who are completely overwhelmed with sickness and disease. Take a second to read this paragraph again and imagine what we are doing to ourselves — and what our children, our society looks like if we get so sick so much earlier in our lives.
Excuse Not To Change #1
I will spare you the numbers but I could most likely be able to fill another book with how bad our health is and how, year by year, we get worse. Most of us will know a lot of this already so it shouldn't be a surprise. The problem is that many of us don't want to change and adopt a healthy lifestyle because we have too much faith in the current medical system.
When I speak on health and diet, one of the biggest arguments I get from people who don't want to change is this: “It’s only because of modern medicine that we are living longer and longer.” This is true to some extent. The current medical system is largely pharmaceutical-based. It is these drugs that are keeping us alive amid the diseases with which we suffer.
Facts: After heart disease and cancer one of the biggest threats to our health is medical care. Adverse side effects from drugs, hospital-borne infections, unnecessary surgeries and medical errors combine to be the third leading cause of premature death in our country!
Our system is broken. We have given away our right to be healthy and entrusted it to the drug companies that are barely keeping us alive. Drug companies are in business for one reason; to make money, hit targets and keep their investors happy. Do you think they really care about your health? No! Therefore, if drug companies have no interest in your health and we get our drugs from our doctors, then who is really watching over your health, your body and your life?
I would really like to think that this information will change the lives of millions of people. In reality though, it is my hope that at the very least everyone who reads this understands that we are sheep to the pharmaceutical companies and that there are many aspects to our lives that we can change on our own to be healthy.